Menus at Midnight

[SimPLsol at aol.com]

     From the date stamps on the email it appears that people have been 
posting around the clock on this issue - including several nightowls here in North 
America.
     I was busy elsewhere yesterday and did not have a chance to reply to 
Richard and Chipp.

     Richard: 
     I don't remember the exact recipe that produced the stack resizing 
problems. I believe it was nothing fancy. After I found a work around I didn't look 
back. From the number of posts on this list over the last year I'd say I'm 
not alone. I didn't mention, as Ben did, the problem with coordinates of objects 
changing depending on whether there as a Mac OS menubar present.

     Chipp: 
     Yes, I did read your workaround (hiding the menu group, etc.) but by 
then I'd found the "resize in openStack" workaround and was already implementing 
that. I believe our two methods (and more, contributed by Sarah and other 
users) highlight the problem. We can make   it work because we are clever (at 
least you are clever) and we read the list religiously - but menus should "just 
work".
     You quote Scott Raney as saying "engine bugs which had known workarounds 
were lower in priority than others." This is one of the biggest philosophical 
problems I have with Revolution. I would paraphrase it "good enough rather 
than good". Of course serious, crippling, bugs need top priority but "Kludges" 
can't be ignored - particularly on fundamental things like menus. And, it seems 
to me, the Revolution team focuses more on exotic new features (which may or 
may not work) rather than dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s in the 
existing product - more people will use menus than unicode or SSL sockets or...

     We veteran HyperCard users tend to praise HC's simplicity, logic, and 
easy utility. But I don't know of any HC users who commend HC's color tools. 
Like the Rev. menu manager, they work (or can be made to work) but they are so 
unrefined and temperamental that they depreciate the entire user experience. I 
believe they helped solidify HC's reputation as an amateur and unreliable 
product - despite the fact most other things worked brilliantly.
     I don't remember a complaint regarding Rev.'s color handling in two 
years reading this list (there might have been one or two I missed, but I'm sure 
it is safe to say there have been more comments on menus in the last week than 
color in the last year). Rev. got color right! It just works. This is how 
menus should be.

     In my experience, there are four things that drive a new Rev user crazy. 
Three of them could be fixed rather easily. I think they all should have been 
fixed by Version 2. The most important of these is the menus. I hope the 
biocomputers in the mother ship are listening. I hope they read Ben's wonderful 
post. I hope we are pleasantly surprised when Version 3 ships.
Paul Looney